Healthy Journalism

Friday, September 19, 2014

All Ebola, all the time

That’s how HMJ’12 graduate Laura Smith described her health
communications work at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on
the day President Obama came to visit.

Carolyn Crist (HMJ’14) said the same, five weeks earlier, when
physician Kent Brantly and health worker Nancy Writebol arrived at Emory
University Hospital for what turned out to be life-saving care. Crist kept
vigil in greater Atlanta and filed nearly every day for www.wired.com

For Liberian journalist Wade C. L. Williams, life has been
“all Ebola, all the time” since the first cases were identified in March. She
is the newsroom chief for Front Page Africa and her coverage of women in West Africa had already won international awards
before the Ebola catastrophe hit.

Williams comes to UGA next month, where she will give a talk
at the UGA Chapel on Thursday, Oct. 23. The event begins at 4 p.m and all are
welcome.

She’ll have a conversation with a select group of GradyCollege students the day before her public talk, as part of the McGill
Symposium. This is Grady’s annual celebration of journalistic courage, and first-year
HMJ student Christopher McGee is one of this year’s McGill Fellows.

Although Front Page Africa is still trying to dig into
political scandals, economic turmoil and other big stories, Ebola coverage is
stretching them thin. Williams is functioning as an editor and as a shoe
leather reporter.

“I've
been scared to death myself sometimes after those difficult assignments,”
Williams wrote in a recent email. “I've covered burials, sick people abandoned,
health facilities abandoned, I've gone into isolation centers, I've interviewed
survivors. But I'm still here, well, not sick.” She’s highly conscious of CDC prevention
guidelines and avoids contact with sick or dead people and their body fluids. Front
Page Africa prominently displays prevention advice and tallies cases and deaths
at the county level.

As an investigative reporter, Williams is not always loved
by the people in power. In a New York Times op-ed piece, Williams lambastes Liberia’s government forfoot-dragging and for stifling media coverage that she says could have
saved lives.

Meanwhile, the United States and other industrialized
nations are finally taking Ebola seriously. As a result, the flow of people and
supplies to West Africa is quickening.

At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, three
recent HMJ graduates are on the Ebola team. Laura Smith’s work in the Joint Information Center of the
Emergency Operations Center earned her an invitation to meet President Obama
when he visited CDC on September 16 to announce additional aid.

All three are
part of the health communications team that competes with misinformation that
inevitably swirls around any high profile disease outbreak. They scramble to
make sure that professionals and the public have timely and accurate information
in a fast-moving world.

Lacey Avery,
who graduated in 2013, works on Ebola response communications in the same room as
Laura. She is part of a team working on messages about infection control and prevention in U.S. and West African healthcare settings. Marcie McClellan, a 2012 HMJ graduate, also develops content but also
checks to see how messages are being received.

“I actually
just back from Arizona where I spent a week facilitating trainings and focus
groups, where I got feedback on our Ebola press releases,” Marcie said in a
Sept. 13 email.

With disease
forecasters saying that Ebola is going to get much worse before it gets better,
the health journalism alums say their agency is in “all-hands-on-deck” mode for
the foreseeable future.

“This is
definitely the most intense response I've been involved in,” said Laura. “It's
all Ebola all the time and the information is constantly changing. My day job
has been put on hold, as is the case with most people involved.”

Independent journalist Carolyn Crist also put her life on
hold when an editor at www.wired.com offered
her the chance to cover the evacuation of two Ebola-infected Americans to
Atlanta.

She moved
into her grandmother's house south of Atlanta and over the next week drove to
press conferences and interviews with experts at Emory University, in Cartersville
(where Phoenix Air is based), at Dobbins
Air Base in Marietta and at Georgia
State University and Georgia Tech.

Carolyn
participated in three press conferences and in three embargoed phone calls
about the latest Ebola vaccine studies, joining the calls with reporters from the
New York Times, Nature, Washington Post, USA Today and other major outlets, an
experience she describes as “thrilling.”

Six of her stories were published online by Wired; she’s now working toward a feature for
the magazine. “Fingers crossed,” Carolyn says.

Ebola is a
global health catastrophe, and its toll on families and communities is sad beyond measure. This is also
a time when reporters and health communicators work to arm us all with information that helps us stay safe and remain connected with our fellow humans.

“Anyone who has gotten to a certain level of success has
been helped multiple times formally or informally,” panelist Laura Helmuth said
during a plenary session on mentoring. Helmuth is the science and health editor
of Slate magazine and serves on the board of the National Association of
Science Writers, which paid for the women in science writing conference at MIT.

Although the idea of veterans helping less established
journalists was universally hailed as a good thing, two caveats surfaced again
and again: Participants were urged to seek female mentors (to reduce sexual
complications) and advised not to become friends with their mentors (unclear to
me why).

Fortunately, nobody gave me this advice when I was a
grasshopper.

As a result, I went out to dinner with Ben Patrusky decades
ago, on break from a giant medical meeting in Miami, and learned that far from
being alone and uniquely incompetent, I was typical. Every science writer
worries about getting the facts wrong, Ben told me, and we all get anxious when
we start a new story. Every time.

Welcome to science writing: a profession filled with people
who oscillate between hubris and imposter syndrome.

Ben was the first of several men who’ve been wonderful
mentors, sponsors and – wait for it – friends during my working life. DonGibbons, Victor McElheny, H. R. Shepherd and Dr. William Ira Bennett are some
of the others. (A sponsor, I learned at the conference, is a highly placed
person in your organization who helps you get a promotion. As opposed to a
mentor, who offers mostly advice.)

Some of my mentors are older than me, some younger. Summit
speakers emphasized that age is irrelevant and what matters is listening, then
knowing what to say and when.

My first and most important mentor was a woman. Willa
Shovar, my ninth-grade homeroom teacher, took an interest in me because I was 13
years old and reading a battered paperback copy of The Tin Drum.As soon as I graduated from high school, she announced that I had to
stop calling her “Mrs. Shovar,” and that we could now become friends. She gave
me the chutzpa to become a writer.

Fast forward to the AIDS catastrophe, when I met Ann Giudici Fettner in the pressroom at the first International Conference on AIDS.
Fearless and profane, she wrote smuggled vials of blood from Africa to U.S.
labs and wrote scientifically brilliant coverage for the Village Voice and The
New York Native. Much later, she emboldened me to write my own book about the
search for an HIV vaccine.

Not knowing any better, I became friends with most of these
folks. Time and distance have taken a toll, as has death. Every one of these
people has enriched my career and made my life better.

Good mentors are hard to find. I hope younger women in
science writing won’t go through life afraid that every male is a sexual
predator. Some are, most are not.

And I hope up-and-coming women science writers won’t be wary
of friendship, which is much less abundant than it appears.

During the conference session on mentoring, scientist and Wired blogger
Gwen Pearson eloquently described a mentor as a door opener, “someone who takes
things unknown and secret and reveals them to you.”

Who doesn’t need that?

So do good work, fight back when you’re dissed and take an
interest in other people. Open a door whenever you can, and thank people who
open one for you.

Saturday, May 24, 2014

Cliff Baile: Obesity Initiative loses its ringmaster

It is a truth rarely acknowledged, that most university
faculty members don’t know what their colleagues do, nor are they motivated to
find out.

This is what Clifton A. “Cliff” Baile was up against when he
set out to organize the University of Georgia’s Obesity Initiative in the
summer of 2011. The plan involved mobilizing hundreds of researchers in dozens
of departments, spread out across the enormous Athens campus, to combat soaring
obesity rates in Georgia.

Many of these researchers, teachers and community outreach
experts had never met. All were busy
with their own work. If asked, most would have said they could not possibly
join another committee or take on anything new.

But Cliff, already a successful scholar, corporate leader
and entrepreneur-- decked out with as
many academic honorifics as a four-star general has medals and ribbons – was a
hard man to turn down.

Cliff had a lot of ringmaster presence: tall, with well-barbered
white hair, a deep voice, and a mischievous twinkle in his eye. I never saw him in a top hat and tails, but he
could have carried it off.

Like any good impresario, he knew how to do his homework.
Minutes into our first conversation, Cliff had discovered who we both knew in
Boston – though our years there did not overlap. He also understood that people
learn most of what they know about health, including nutrition and physical
activity, from the media. He saw news organizations, such as Georgia Health
News, as potential friends of the scientific enterprise. He knew reporters were
not the enemy.

I direct a health and medical journalism graduate program at
UGA, and students do hands-on reporting in Georgia. They were already
generating considerable coverage of obesity’s impact on individuals,
communities and the economy. If what Cliff proposed became a reality, and UGA
threw its resources at this growing problem, there would be even more stories
to tell.

Of course I said “yes” to Cliff and signed up with the
Obesity Initiative. Since 2012 I’ve participated in teams focused on maternal
and childhood obesity, community health and persuasive communication.

All told, the Obesity Initiative now has 130 UGA faculty
working together in 14 teams. These teams work on grants, experiments and
interventions dealing with virtual reality, the basic science of metabolism and
genetics, clinical research on diet and physical activity, community walking
programs and more.

When these groups convene, in conference rooms scattered
across the campus, Cliff and his program manager, Diane Hartzell, were almost
always there. If it was lunchtime, they brought pizza and fresh fruit. If the
conversation wandered, Cliff guided it back on track. If spirits flagged
because a grant proposal was turned down, Cliff got people fired up to try
again.

These are the most diverse groups of teachers, researchers
and extension experts that I’ve found on this campus or any other.

My guess is that Cliff recruited all these folks the same
way he did me: by taking a genuine interest in them, both professionally and
personally, and making them want to run away and join his circus.

Members of the HMJ crew helped organize and lead workshops, wrote
reports for a top
science organization, blogged sessions for conference organizers, used what
they heard to launch stories of their own, and had real-life conversations with
people who had previously been distant, bold-faced names. (Such as Jill
Abramson and Nate Silver.)

They learned lessons large and small, as two blog posts by Ian Branam illustrate.

LinkedIn for
JournalistsBy Ian Branam

As a journalist, I’ve learned to get creative on a deadline.
I’ve used Facebook pages, YouTube videos and research articles to assist me in
my reporting.

At the Online News
Association (ONA) conference this October, I acquired another resource to
help me grow as a journalist: LinkedIn.

I learned that LinkedIn can be much more than a digital
space to store your résumé. The LinkedIn for Journalists tutorial taught me not
only the most effective way to set up your LinkedIn profile to attract
prospective employers, but also, more intriguingly, how to find sources for
stories.

By using the alumni tool, you can find people that worked
for a certain company that might have gone to the same college as you.

For example, if there’s a breaking story that Google is
releasing a new smartphone, I might want to contact a Google employee to get
some exclusive information like when it’s being released or what features it
will have.

By using LinkedIn’s alumni tool, I can select Google
employees that graduated from UGA, and an entire list of people that fit those
criteria would show up in the search results. This gives me a chance to find
contact information on their LinkedIn profile or to send them a direct message
on LinkedIn.

But, here comes the most important part. When I do make the
decision to contact the person, I can use that connection we have as UGA
alumni. By referencing the fact that we both went to the same school, this
provides a sense of commonality.

People are much more inclined to talk to you if they feel
like they can relate to you, which makes this a vital tool for finding experts
to interview. Simply signing off with a “Go Dawgs!” can go a long way in
connecting with people who might have otherwise brushed off your request to
interview.

I’ve been fairly successful getting professors to set aside
time to speak with me. When dealing with a busy physician or hospital
executive, however, I haven’t been as lucky. This is where something like
having an Alma Mater in common can make the difference.

Another helpful tool I learned from this seminar is how to
go into stealth mode through the privacy settings. If I’m interested in working
for a particular employer, but I don’t want them to see that I viewed their
LinkedIn page, I can make myself appear anonymous when that employer pulls up
who’s viewed their profile.

Lessons from the
Meatless Mondays CampaignBy Ian Branam

Meatless Mondays began during World War II to save key foods
for the military. Since then, Meatless Mondays have taken on a different
purpose.

In 2003, Sid Lerner, a former ad man, revived the Meatless
Monday in conjunction with the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future.
Meatless Mondays weren’t intended to save food for the military but rather to
adopt healthier eating habits by going meatless one day a week.

In 2006, the campaign expanded to include other health
behaviors like tobacco cessation. In short, Meatless Mondays became about
dedicating the first day of every week to health.

This campaign was one of three health communication
campaigns included in the “Lessons from Mature Health Communication Campaigns”
session at the National
Conference on Health Communication, Marketing and Media this past August.
The lessons from this campaign taught me a great deal about how disseminating
messages at the beginning of the week can make health communication more
effective.

The shared experience of Mondays provides people with
context for change. Monday represents a fresh start to adopt healthy behaviors.

We break our lives down into weeks. We plan meals by the
week rather than by the month. It’s more effective to give someone a list of
healthy meals at the beginning of the week before they’ve gone grocery shopping
than at the end.

People also exhibit healthier behaviors at the beginning of
the week.

Researchers from the Meatless Monday campaign noticed a spike
in calls to smoking cessation help lines on Mondays and a gradual decline
throughout the week. Every state has noticed this trend in calling patterns to
quit-smoking lines.

People are more likely to start diets, exercise regimens,
quit smoking and schedule doctor’s appointments on Monday than any other day
according to a 2012 survey by the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. People
also search the word “healthy” more often on Monday than any other day of the
week according to a 2011 survey by Google. Put simply, people are more open to
healthy behaviors on Mondays.

Finally, many acute events including heart attacks and
strokes happen on Monday, which researchers from Johns Hopkins believe is
caused by stress and unhealthy weekend behaviors.

This is incredible insight for health communicators. As
social media continues to play a greater role in communicating health
information due to its cost-effectiveness and ability to directly engage with
intended audiences, knowledge of trends like this is vital.

The Meatless Monday campaign also found that engagement with
audiences on social media spiked on Mondays and gradually decreased throughout
the week.

With programs out there like Hootsuite and SproutSocial that
allow you to schedule tweets and Facebook posts in advance, this knowledge is
helpful for disseminating health information that can be seamlessly integrated
into peoples’ daily lives.

Healthy Journalism

Grady College's Health & Medical Journalism Masters program at University of Georgia prepares reporters to write accurate, timely, interesting and credible articles about health and medical news for various audiences. Basic newswriting skills are required, and it helps to have a spirit of adventure. Students receive hands-on training by exploring and reporting health issues impacting various counties in Northeast Georgia.